Writers › Writer / Poet
Mahmud al-Kashgari
Karakhanid scholar from Kashgar who compiled the Diwan Lughat al-Turk in Arabic in Baghdad, preserving a large body of early Turkic verse.
Mural of the cultural record “Songs of Tibet and the Northwest Peoples”, which this person is tied to.
Also known as Mahmud ibn al-Husayn ibn Muhammad al-Kashgari
- Roles
- Writer / Poet
Mahmud al-Kashgari, from Kashgar, belonged to the Karakhanid royal house. He travelled among the Turkic peoples, saying he had been through all their villages and steppes, collecting words and oral verse, and in Baghdad between 1072 and 1074 he compiled the Diwan Lughat al-Turk in Arabic, dedicating it to the Abbasid caliph in 1077. The book quotes early Turkic poetry, largely in quatrains, across epic, pastoral, didactic, lyric and elegiac genres, and is a key source for the languages and folk song of the Turkic peoples of the Western Regions.
Life and times
Dates Dates disputed; compiled and dedicated the Diwan Lughat al-Turk in Baghdad, 1072–1077